The President Can Still Wage Secret Wars

Thirty years ago last Wednesday, a plane was shot down. As it spiraled into a Central American jungle, it brought down the curtain behind which a secret government was selling missiles to the state sponsor of terrorism and making war in the countries of the isthmus. The pilot survived and, 30 years ago tomorrow, he was trotted out by his captors for a news conference. His name was Eugene Hasenfus.

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(As always, the essential text for this peculiar anniversary is Theodore Draper's masterful A Very Thin Line.)

Hasenfus was an airman in the employ of a CIA front group called "Corporate Air Services." His mission was to re-supply elements of the Contra army, the American-sponsored guerrillas whose goal was to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. This effort was in direct contravention of a law passed by Congress that forbade the delivery of lethal weapons of war to the Contras. In response to that law, members of the administration of Ronald Reagan had set up a public-private partnership through which they could continue arming the Contras.

Of course, when Hasenfus' plane went down, a simply amazing fog of lies, half-truths, and omissions emerged from the intelligence community. Documents were shredded and, later, before Congress and a national television audience, people bragged about how many documents they had shredded. Ronald Reagan compared Hasenfus to the Americans who had gone to fight the fascists in Spain in the 1930s. They had a lot to hide. By the time the plane had augured in, the operation already had begun the process of selling weapons to Iran and, in turn, using the proceeds of that sale to help fund and arm the Contras.

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The capture of Hasenfus—and a whole batch of embarrassing documents that were aboard his battered old airplane—was the very beginning of the end for what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair, the great lost opportunity for the re-establishment of the American republic. There was a chance to demand democratic accountability for even the most secret of government activities. There was a chance to demonstrate that Congress, not the Executive branch, still has the constitutional power both to raise money and to make war. But the only way to take advantage of that chance was to hew to the rule of law and let the chips fall, even if that meant they fell in the Oval Office and buried the occupant.

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Alas, that didn't happen. The investigations went only so far and, when the water was rising over his ankles, President George H.W. Bush pardoned everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door. Very few people paid an actual price for what really was a sort of low-running coup d'etat in American politics and, when the Supreme Court handed the presidency to the younger Bush, many of the same figures who scurried for cover when Hasenfus' plane went down came back into the light and into government service, including Elliot Abrams, who was the early point man in the effort to cloud Hasenfus' role in the Reagan Administration's covert criminality.

You don't really need a Eugene Hasenfus to do that any more. The weapons are flown by people behind consoles, which very rarely are shot down in hostile territory. But, through custom and through a steady erosion of constitutional norms, the basic ability of whoever gets elected to do pretty much whatever she (or he) wants with the military might of the United States will remain unchecked by substantial congressional oversight.

In a related development…

TRUMP: I think that it basically has fallen. OK? It basically has fallen. Let me tell you something. You take a look at Mosul. The biggest problem I have with the stupidity of our foreign policy, we have Mosul. They think a lot of the ISIS leaders are in Mosul. So we have announcements coming out of Washington and coming out of Iraq, we will be attacking Mosul in three weeks or four weeks. Well, all of these bad leaders from ISIS are leaving Mosul. Why can't they do it quietly? Why can't they do the attack, make it a sneak attack, and after the attack is made, inform the American public that we've knocked out the leaders, we've had a tremendous success? People leave. Why do they have to say we're going to be attacking Mosul within the next four to six weeks, which is what they're saying? How stupid is our country?

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